The new manufacturing tech that will bring high-resolution displays to every device

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Ever since Apple rolled out the Retina display on the 3rd gen iPad, users have been clamoring for high resolution displays on larger devices. Fifteen months ago, when we last dove into this topic, it was clear that while ultra-high resolution displays were coming, it was going to be quite some time before they truly hit the mass market. Today, Applied Materials is launching a trio of new manufacturing systems that are designed to address the limitations keeping next-generation displays out of reach of consumers.

The biggest reason you can’t stroll down to Fry’s or NewEgg and by yourself a 30-inch, 7680×4320 monitor is that producing such a panel is incredibly expensive with current manufacturing techniques. Even Asus’ 4K display, released earlier this spring, is retailing for $3500. For decades, LCDs were built on a substrate of amorphous silicon (a-SI), a cheap, easily constructed substance that’s extremely scalable, fairly easy to work with, and incapable of scaling effectively to meet the pixel densities or power requirements of high resolution displays. Two standards have come forward to take its place — metal oxide technology, which we’ll primarily be discussing today, and LTPS (low temperature polysilicon).

Sharp has been talking about its version of metal oxide technology, called Igzo, for several years, and we’ve followed its adoption and use by several companies. The trick, however, is that while Igzo is easier to build than LTPS, it doesn’t qualify as “easy.” The process is highly dependent on insulating the metal oxide layer from hydrogen contamination. The entire metal oxide thin film layer requires extremely tight tolerances — far tighter than typical a-SI. As you’d expect, this drastically drives up cost.

Applied Materials’ three new manufacturing machines should help cut costs by improving quality control and flexibility at multiple points in the production process. The new AKT 55KS PECVD is a Plasma Enhanced Physical Vapor Deposition system that’s designed to better control the amount of hydrogen gas inside the manufacturing chamber, allow for a more uniform distribution of deposited material, and eliminate defects.

The other two machines — the AKT PiVot 25K DT and PiVot 55K DT are essentially the same system, but built at two different sizes. The 25K system is designed to build displays for Generation 5 & 6 equipment (think smartphones and tablets) while the 55K handles panels that would fit laptops and standalone displays.

These two new pieces of equipment are physical vapor deposition systems. Typically, a PVD system relies on a block of starter material which is bombarded or evaporated in a high temperature vacuum and condenses on a substrate. Conventional PVD manufacturing can lead to less-than-uniform distributions of material, however, which in turn increases defect density, power consumption, and drives up cost. The 25K and 55K DT systems neatly bypass part of this problem by using a tube of material rather than a block and rotating it during the depositing process.

What this means, in aggregate, is that these new systems should improve thin-film metal oxide yields, thus helping to lower the cost and improve the quality of high resolution displays, thus helping to ensure that we don’t end up with power-sucking amorphous silicon systems or are forced to stick with 1366×768 forever. While the value of a “Retina” display (and the pixel density needed to achieve it) falls off sharply with viewing distance, there’s a definite market for high resolution panels in certain circumstances.

Of course, new equipment availability doesn’t translate directly into immediate full production ramps; Applied Materials announcement today should be treated as impacting the display market over the next 6-18 months rather than having an immediate effect. Still, the shift to Igzo offers benefits in terms of power consumption. There may also be other benefits — higher electron mobility and smaller transistor sizes could lead to improvements in color quality and possibly reduce LCD lag thanks to better response times.

One tangential, but related point, is that the growth of Igzo/metal oxide manufacturing isn’t likely to have much of an impact on OLED ramps. While it’s possible to combine the two, it’s not a current focus.

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